


Rule 6

by Nevcolleil



Category: Inception (2010), White Collar
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 06:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13565049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: Things would be so much easier if all of them lived by Arthur's rules. (Probably. Not that Arthur follows them often enough himself.)





	Rule 6

It was on a job or- Technically, it was _after_ a job. After _the_ job that wouldn’t end. They were still doing legit work then, but legit work was no less dangerous when dreamsharing first began to catch on than some of the illicit jobs that they would do later. 

The key was _where_ dreamsharing was legit and who your client happened to be. Dom had been commissioned by the DoD, which - seeing as America was one of the first eighteen countries to officially legalize dreamsharing under a specific set of conditions - should have made things easy. The problem was that he’d been commissioned to do the job in Turkey, and dreamsharing laws didn’t exist there then. Extraction was treated as a sort of combination of privacy violation and home invasion, basically one of a thousand moderate crimes that could get you thrown into a Turkish prison until somebody finally figured out what they could say they were imprisoning you for. And the Turkish prime minister of the day was a paranoid fellow, so it was a bet that, if he and his team got caught pulling an extraction on Turkish soil, the verdict wouldn’t say anything good.

The DoD wanted to know what business a wealthy Turkish executive had conducted in the US just recently. The man’s father and uncle had ties with a known arms dealer and hadn’t set foot out of their own country (in a manner indiscreet enough to get themselves caught) in a decade. He’d been questioned about the dubious timing and nature of his trip but hadn’t given anything up, wouldn’t consent to a lie-detector test, and was unaware of just how badly the US wanted the particular arms dealer his nearest and dearest had been funding.

Dom didn’t have to take the job. He and Mal had done some delicate work for the military, both separately and together, before, but rarely as part of a covert operation. The story was that he and Mal could use the hefty payoff from the job (they were expecting Phillipa then; Mal was in her third trimester). There were other civilian dreamshare specialists that the DoD could engage, but none with Dom’s expertise or experience in working with the government. The truth was something Dom felt sure his military contacts would not appreciate, no more than he appreciated having his wife point it out to him.

“You’re hoping they’ll let you work with that Arthur again, aren’t you?” she asked, smiling coyly when they talked about it.

“No.” He considered letting the lie sit between them, but Mal’s pointed look deflated the attempt. “Okay, _yes_. Yes, I admit it. Are you happy now?” 

“Extremely. You don’t have to deny it, darling. I think this would all be so much easier on you if you did.”

Dom accepted the advice but had no intention of taking it. Mal might have been open-minded enough to find his infatuation with the young lieutenant he’d been partnered with on a number of government operations _endearing_ , but Dom wasn’t certain that Arthur would describe it that way. Dom is nearly ten years older than Arthur. He was married and a civilian and, let’s not forget, a _man_. If Dom doesn’t ask, he decided, then Arthur doesn’t have to tell Dom to go fuck himself. 

“Mal’s gonna kill me if I get us thrown in a Turkish prison,” Dom said, keeping things light. He kind of sucks at that, but it’s not like he had a lot of material to work with at that moment. He and Arthur were hiding out in a shack literally the size of a small walk-in closet, evading their target (they didn’t call them _marks_ then, they called them targets; military lingo). 

“Neal will help her after he’s finished killing me,” Arthur quipped. Arthur hadn’t revealed much about himself to Dom at that point (not that he’s ever been a font of personal information; Dom has to work for every peek behind the curtain that he gets); Dom’s preoccupation with Arthur began for reasons that don’t involve the names of people and places, specifics dates or events. He was impressed by Arthur’s professional skill and his stoicism, his sharp ,dry humor and his quick wit. He’d had dreams about Arthur’s precise hands and the shape of his lips. He was, naturally, fascinated by this slip of Arthur’s tongue, brought on by the urgency of their situation or maybe the tedium of their having to hide out for a prolonged period of time. 

It could have been because they hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours that Arthur had become chatty, though, too. That or because of the bandaged wound in his side that Dom was trying very hard not to think about while they couldn’t do anything for it.

“Neal, huh?” Dom asked. “Boyfriend?” Tedium makes him reckless, and urgency makes him bold.

Arthur laughed, then groaned because the laughing had to hurt him. “Oh, _god_ no. Brother. Twin, actually.”

Dom had a lot to process after that one sentence. The fact that Arthur has a _brother_ … a _twin_ brother… An identical twin? Dom thought about it for a minute and then forbade himself from thinking about it while in a small, enclosed space with Arthur. 

Then he felt stupid for thinking lewd thoughts while _evading being shot or imprisoned in Turkey_. While Arthur sat near him bleeding, for fuck’s sake. And felt stupid again when he realized that the lewd thoughts were a self-made distraction, distracting Dom from the relief he felt when Arthur said he didn’t have a boyfriend.

Which was neither here nor there since Dom was still married. The chances of Arthur being interested in him were still slim to none. And the vehemence with which Arthur denied having a boyfriend did not say good things about how Arthur would receive the news that Dom is interested in him.

Dom turned his attention back to their predicament. It was _sweltering_ in their hiding place. He had helped Arthur strip out of his shirt and jacket when they’d tended to the gash in Arthur’s side, but Dom was still wearing several layers of clothing. He pulled off his own coat and shirt, leaving him cooler, naked above the waist save for the sleeveless undershirt that, after a moment’s consideration, Dom pulled off as well. He was having a hard enough time thinking intelligently without the heat preying on his senses, and it’s not like modesty would amount to much under the circumstances. Arthur didn’t see Dom that way and was probably doing a much better job at keeping his mind on the second half of their mission (to get back out of Turkey) than Dom, even though Arthur was the one being hindered by an injury.

It wasn’t until Dom turned to look at Arthur, in the little bit of light leaking into the shack through the gaps around the edges of its doors and shutters, and saw that Arthur’s eyes were closed and his lips moving, that Dom realized _Arthur_ was the source of the soft, almost hiss-like sound Dom could just barely make out.

“Arthur?” Dom asked, louder than he intended and than was probably wise. He shuffled closer to Arthur on his hands and feet, til he was sitting near enough to do something if he had to, not that he was certain what that something might be. “Are you al-”

Arthur’s eyes opened immediately. Dom startled, but didn’t curb the hand that had started to reach across Arthur, for the bandages covering Arthur’s wounded side, until he saw Arthur start to flinch. “ _I’m fine_. Don’t-” Dom pulled back quickly, fingertips barely brushing Arthur’s bare shoulder as Arthur shifted. Dom would swear that Arthur shuddered, and he balled his fingers into fists, vowing to keep his hands to himself. Had Arthur somehow picked up on some of Dom’s thoughts? If Dom was making Arthur uncomfortable, on top of everything else- “Flesh wounds sting like a bitch,” Arthur said. “I’m fine. I just need to keep my mind off of it.”

“Right.” Dom could help him do that, if nothing else. “So why would your brother wanna kill you? Technically, I blew our cover with the target.”

“I broke a rule,” Arthur told him, matter-of-fact.

Apparently, Dom’s surprise was obvious even in the near dark. Arthur is the most by-the-book player Dom knows - was then too, though it was a different book Arthur played by at the time. One sanctioned by the U.S. government. Arthur snorted. “Not an _order_ , a rule. It’s this- It’s something me and my brother do. Neal’s not good with orders… Or laws. Or anything demonstrating an even partial respect for authority, actually, so when we were kids we started making up these rules. For just the two of us. And I broke one. Rule Number Six.”

Arthur turned his face sideways towards Dom. “It probably sounds stupid,” he said. 

“No. No, it’s-” Dom wanted to say _cute_ , because it was cute. He thought of a little bitty Arthur and his doppleganger coming up with a bunch of rules to live by because the ones available “lacked specificity” and thought it was adorable. He couldn’t imagine Arthur appreciating the term, however, so he just asked, “What’s Rule Number Six?”

Arthur hesitated. When he spoke, Dom saw why. “I didn’t tell him what I was doing in Turkey,” Arthur explained. 

“Isn’t that against one of your bosses’ rules?” 

Arthur hadn’t said as much, but Dom assumed this Neal didn’t have the clearance to know what Arthur did in the United States Army’s dreamshare division. If there were more where Arthur came from, and the Army knew about it, word would already have gotten around. 

Arthur ignored Dom’s statement, as he often does when someone remarks upon the obvious. Dom smiled.

“Rule Number Six is ‘ _Run ideas by each other before acting, or plan everything together._ ‘” Arthur elaborated. “Obviously we can’t do that last thing now that we’re rarely in the same place at the same time working on the same thing, but we always give each other the heads up when we’re about to do something dangerous. I didn’t give Neal the heads up about this.”

Dom wondered what sort of dangerous things Arthur’s brother did often enough that they had a rule for it, and who he did them for. “Why not?” he asked instead.

Arthur replied with another number. “Rule Number Sixty-Two.” Dom could see Arthur’s teeth and knew that he was smiling. “Neal thinks I’ll get shot again if I keep taking missions in this part of Europe.”

It wasn’t really funny but Dom found himself smiling back at Arthur. The funny/not-funny thing about Arthur’s statement was that Arthur _had_ got himself shot again. Or, at least, very badly grazed. “How many rules are there?” He was genuinely curious.

Arthur thought about it a moment. “Fifty-three,” he said in a few seconds.

“I thought you said-”

“They aren’t numbered in order. Neal bores easy. He never does anything in a straight line. I thought we should make things interesting.”

Dom doesn’t know which part of Arthur’s explanation he still finds hard to believe - that Neal could be so different from his twin, or that anyone could be bored by a creation of Arthur’s mind. Arthur’s ideas, in the dream world, are neat and simple on the surface. But full of paradoxical architecture, layers of complexity packaged deceptively as one basic pattern of organization.

Distracted by this thought, it wasn’t until later that Dom realized he should have asked Arthur about Rule Number Thirty-three. If he wasn’t mistaken, that was what Arthur had been talking to himself about when Dom heard him hiss. 

Dom asked Arthur, later, if Neal had forgiven him for breaking one of their sacred rules. Arthur looked taken aback for a moment, as if he’d forgotten sharing this detail about himself with his- What had Dom become to Arthur during their time in Turkey? Something. Something more than team members on the odd occasion that the Army needed a civilian on one of Arthur’s teams. Arthur could have spent the three days they were kept on a base back in D.C., being debriefed and having their extracted intel evaluated, anywhere at all, but he’d accepted every one of Dom’s invitations to spend their time together, and he’d even invited Dom along on a tour of the base’s dreamshare trainee wing. Dom’s pretty sure Arthur didn’t clear the tour with the powers that be before he did either.

For a moment Dom worried that he’d made a mistake, then Arthur smiled. “He had to,” Arthur said. “It’s our Rule Number Two.”

Dom felt like he’d been let in on some sort of secret language.

“But he threatened a lot of unpleasant things if I do it again, and Neal doesn’t make idle threats.”

Dom could believe it. Arthur isn’t one for idle threats either.

“In that case, you’d better tell him that Mal’s invited you over for dinner. A pregnant woman’s pallet is a strange and dangerous thing.”

Arthur accepted Mal’s invitation. He even seemed to enjoy himself, on that first of many evenings to come, over at the Cobb’s. Mal mouthed ‘I told you so’s at Dom all evening. 

Dom wondered if Neal had a rule against letting foolish, happily married men fall for his brother, but kept his questions to himself.


End file.
